Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

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“This can't be true but I remember it.”

“They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived—bound, in other words, for life.”

“The window was still open,” Mr Lisbon said. “I don’t think we’d ever remembered to shut it. It was all clear to me. I knew I had to close that window or else she’d go on jumping out of it forever.”

“She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.”

“Lux spent the ride dialing the radio for her favorite song. "It makes me crazy," she said. "You know they're playing it somewhere, but you have to find it.”

“We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.”

“It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.”

“Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.”

“Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.”

“And in some of the houses, people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.”

“All sixteen mentioned her jutting ribs, the insubstantiality of her thighs, and one, who went up to the roof with Lux during a warm winter rain, told us how the basins of her collarbones collected water.”

“It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.”

“What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn't like?”

“She kept her face to the floor, moving in her personal oblivion, her sunflower eyes fixed on the predicament of her life we would never understand.”

“We listened to them, but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth.”

“Pregnancy humbles husbands. After an initial rush of male pride they quickly recognise the minor role that nature had assigned them in the drama of reproduction.”

“Every letter was a love letter. Of course, as love letters went, this one could have been better. It was not very promising, for instance, that Madeleine claimed not to want to see him for the next half-century.”

“If Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely.”

“It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.”

“She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.”

“She had given birth to me and nursed me and brought me up. She had known me before I knew myself and now she had no say in the matter. Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.”

“that since Cecilia’s suicide, the Lisbons could hardly wait for night to forget themselves in sleep.”

“Yes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at a little photograph of you. Then they believe you exist.”

“They thought depression was like bieng 'depressed'. They thought it was like being in a bad mood, only worse. Therefore, they tried to get him to snap out of it.”